The objectives related to Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova as integral parts of the West “will take a long time to be achieved and we may not see them fulfilled by 2030”. This is the conclusion reached by Valentin Naumescu, former top diplomat and current professor of international relations at the Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj, who signed an analysis published in “Contributor.ro” and entitled “NATO Summit 75 and the West’s entry into the Long War Era”. The author states that “it becomes more obvious than ever that the enlargement of the security space to the East, with the inclusion of Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova in an “adjacent NATO security space” and with prospects for full long-term security of the two post-Soviet republics, would fully benefit Romania, which would no longer be on the fringes of NATO and the EU. But both goals, related to Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova as integral parts of the West, will take a long time to be achieved and we may not see them fulfilled by 2030,” IPN reports.

Times are extremely turbulent. The dramatic changes in domestic politics and the reverberations of international politics on internal democracies affect an important part of the NATO and EU member countries, implicitly the two organizations as a whole. Neither NATO nor the EU will be the same at the end of the war, as before the war, says the expert.

The author believes that “Putin’s bet was that the two organizations would disintegrate under the pressure of big challenges and national cowardice, but the aggression so far led only to the strengthening of the two Western organizations. NATO has expanded to 32 members, with Finland and Sweden coming out of their old neutrality and choosing the North Atlantic Alliance, while Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova are NATO partners and have already started EU accession negotiations. None of the above changes would have happened without Putin’s War.”

Valentin Naumescu believes that “the solemn and serious air at the NATO Summit betrays the hostile winds that blow for world change. Political leaders, military commanders and strategists in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin and Brussels are preparing for a long war. A long war in Ukraine, a long war for the reconstruction, stabilization and re-credibilization of the European security order, a long war for the geopolitically peripheral territories (Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Taiwan, etc.) that democratically aspire to adhere to an integrated civilizational space, but are aggressed and dragged back by the rival space, a long war for global supremacy between Western liberal democracies and the axis of Eastern dictatorships, represented in essence by the U.S. and China. It would be naïve not to realize that such preparations for the Long War Era, generational and hybrid, are also being made in Beijing or Moscow. No one believes anymore that “it’s over by Christmas”. The atmosphere at the events seems gloomy, like the times, but it hides a huge complex of reflections, scenarios, technological innovations, simulations, resource allocations, legislative adaptations, infrastructure modernizations, etc., all meant to prepare the two blocks for a possible confrontation. None of the sides is idle.”

The author repudiates the misleading formula with the “multipolar world order” circulated by Vladimir Putin, describing it as just a hypocritical form of saying that Russia wants to return to the negotiation of the spheres of influence of the Cold War, in which dictatorships receive a slice of the world and will be left to do what they want with it, without being accountable and without respecting the universal rules of international law,  Western-inspired individual rights and freedoms. The formula may seem “reasonable” and “balanced” to some who are more weak-kneed, but it is essentially profoundly unfair, because it sacrifices countries and nations to be “assigned” at the negotiating table of that pole, against their will. We, here, in Romania and in the region, should be the first to understand this, says Valentin Naumescu.